Turning Adam's Disobedience into
Opportunity: The Acquisition of Property and
Identity in Sir John Fortescue's Theory of
Natural Law
E. Kay Harris
Waged by Lancastrian and Yorldst dynasties in the second half of the fifteenth century, the English civil wars blown as the Wars of the Roses counterposed two royal
lines of succession. Through a statute enacted decades before the outbreak of civil
strife, Henry IV, the first Lancastrian king, sought to guarantee the English throne
for his heirs. This 1406 statute "ordained and established, That the inheritance of the
Crown, and of the Realms of England and France, and of all other Dominions of our
Lord the King beyond the Sea, with all the Appurtenances, shall be settled and
remain in the Person of the same our Lord the King, and in the Heirs of his Body
begotten...." 1 The statute was eventually challenged during the reign of Henry VI,
the grandson of Henry IV
Declared and attainted a traitor to the king in 1459, Richard, Duke of York,
asserted that his right to the throne preceded that of Henry VI. York traced his lineage, as did the Lancastrian Henry VI, back to Edward III but through Edward's
third son, Lionel. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was the fourth son. York reasoned that a statute which entailed the Crown attested to the illegitimacy of the very
line of descent that it sought to secure. Additionally, he argued that there was a
higher law that claimed one's obedience over any statute, observing that the 1406
statute was "of no force or effect ayenst him that is right enheriter of the said Corones, as it accordeth with Godd's lawe, and all natural lawes..."2 As E.F. Jacob has
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noted, the eventual success of York's claim, although the higher law was backed up
by force, revealed that "God's law of inheritance [was] valid, and not to be defeated
by parliament." 3 Indeed, York's subordination of statute law to God and natural law
reflects a traditional medieval outlook. 4
The Yorkists forced Henry VI from England in 1461. Richard was killed in battle; his eldest son, Edward, became the first Yorkist king. Henry and various Lancastrian supporters took up residence in Scotland. Among those accompanying the
deposed king was Sir John Fortescue (^1385-1479), Chief Justice of the King's
Bench. Early during this exile Fortescue completed De Natura Legis Naturae, et de
Eius Censura in Sueeessione Regnorum Supreme (c 1462, or The Nature of the Law of
Nature, and Its Judgment on the Succession of Sovereign Kingdoms), a treatise that without referring directly to the Yorkist-Lancastrian debate nevertheless sets out the criteria for distinguishing a true line of royal succession, and thus a natural one, from a
false, unnatural one. 5
Locating the problem of royal descent in the Kingdom of Assyria, Fortescue
divides De Natura into two parts. Part I explains why natural law should be used to
solve the succession question, and Part II devises a courtroom setting in which three
claimants to the throne present their respective cases to a judge. Both Parts I and II
are designed to solve this dispute. As Fortescue formulates it:
A King, acknowledging no superior in things temporal, has a daughter and
a brother; the daughter bears a son. The King dies without sons. The question is, whether the kingdom of the King so deceased descends to the
Daughter, the Daughter's Son, or the Brother of the King. 6
Fortescue's Assyrian allegory introduces a woman into the equation for an important
reason. For although the Yorkist line traced its lineage back to the third son of
Edward III, the inheritance of that son, Lionel, descended to a daughter, Philippa,
his only heir. Thus, it is Fortescue's project to have the Judge determine that natural
law excludes women and their heirs from inheriting public property. De Natura,
therefore, enters deliberately into the politics of royal and non-roval identity through
the lens of gender and sexual difference.
Following medieval tradition, Fortescue derives the origin of property from the
Fall of Adam and Eve. Yet Fortescue's particular emphasis on God's declaration to
Adam that he will henceforth earn his bread through the sweat of his brow exceeds
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that tradition. 7 For Fortescue this particular penalty holds within it the right of men
and not women to acquire, transfer, and inherit property. While he explicitly appeals
to the inalterability of natural gender differences to justify a masculine descent of
property, his theory of the natural law of royal succession depends as well on an
implicit instability in the relation between gender and perceived sexual difference. I
argue that the elasticity of masculine and feminine identities in De Natura allows
Fortescue to establish royal dignity as a unique property that defines a king as the
most masculine of men who has the authority to confiscate and reallocate both the
land and the gender of his subjects. In so doing, Fortescue simulateneously inscribes
his own authority or property to interpret divine, natural, and secular law in such a
way as to benefit kings and, most importantly, himself.
The Descent of Property
Arguing in Part II of the treatise that he is the rightful heir to the throne of Assyria,
the Brother of the King submits that both natural and divine law preclude a woman
and her heirs from inheriting public property. Thus, while the Daughter of the King
"be the natural and domestic medium between the grandfather and the grandson, by
which the blood and private inheritance of the grandfather may be transferred to the
grandson, yet in respect of the kingdom, which is public property, and which the
daughter cannot receive from the grandfather, she is a strange and foreign medium"
(297, emphasis added). To support this thesis, the Brother relates the history of
property and describes the law that governs its descent.
As he remarks, Scripture indicates that "before the fall of man, the law of nature
in no way revealed" the right of inheritance "to men" (291). That is, before the Fall,
"our first parents...possessed all things in common" (291). Indeed, earlier in the text,
Fortescue has explained that "the very law which now makes us say, 'this is mine and
that thine,' before the sin of man forbad" us to do so (211). The origin of property
occurs, therefore, as a consequence of the first sin. The Brother, in fact, specifically
identifies one particular punishment of the Fall as the origin of the property: When
our "first parents...forsook their state of innocence, presently, the Lord said to the
human race, 'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread;' in which words was
granted to man a property in things which he should acquire by his labour" (291).
Although the biblical narrative of the Fall does indeed have God tell Adam that he
will toil for his bread, it says nothing of the acquisition of property. In point of fact,
Genesis accentuates punishment, situating the penalty of work between God's curse
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on the earth and the promise that Adam will toil until the day he returns "unto the
ground...for dust thou art" (Genesis 3:19). The biblical narrative thus emphasises
adverse changes in Adam's relation to God and to the earth. Moreover, the punishments meted out to both Adam and Eve are followed by their joint expulsion from
the Garden of Eden. Our first parents, therefore, are dispossessed of what they once
enjoyed.
Yet while the biblical account bespeaks loss, the penalty for sin in the Brother's
narrative leads not to dispossession but to the acquisition of property. The bridge
between the Genesis narrative and the Brother's argument hinges on his reading of
"sweat" as the catalyst that through a series of steps transforms loss into gain. "For
since," he reasons, "the bread which a man gained by his labour was his own, and no
man could eat bread without the sweat of his own brow, every man who toiled not
was prohibited from eating bread which by his own sweat another man had
acquired." Here Fortescue echoes John of Paris who, in the Tractatus de Potcstate
Regia et Papali, observed that possessions are "acquired by individuals through their
own manufacture, industry, and labour. And individuals as individuals have right,
power, and true dominion." 8 What was once common to all is now earned individuall}' by those who work.
Moreover, the sweat that a man expends translates into bread, and by bread "our
ancestors taught us to understand...not only what is eaten and drunk, but everything
whereby man is sustained" (291). Sweat also performs another important function:
"because property so acquired ensures as a compensation for the sweat by which the
body of the acquirer is enfeebled, the reason of the law of nature hath united it to its
acquirer, so that the property gained might compensate the damage resulting from
his loss of bodily weakness" (291). Indeed, the penalty God imposes on Adam takes
on a positive aspect, a means to overcome the dispossession described in Genesis. In
the Brother's narrative, the loss of sweat substitutes for the loss of Eden.
The sweat a man expends results in two types of properties: external property,
such as land, and internal property, such as an innate right or attribute. It is this
two-fold aspect of sweat and property that, according to Fortescue, founds the law of
the descent of property. For the property that is gained through labour:
takes die place of the man's bodily integrity, which he has lost and coheres
as an accident to the toiler...so thenceforth [it] accompanies his blood.
And...property accrues to him by the rules of the law of nature, and, after
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the likeness of a natural accident, is united to him....Wherefore such a proprietor hath a son descending from him, a certain right to the patrimony so
acquired also descends in the father's lifetime in a latent manner to that son,
as being a portion of his father's blood and so a sharer in his toil. And, as
the flower bursting forth before the fruit is not the fruit, but a token of
coming fruit, so that right which descends to the son in his father's lifetime
is not a property in his father's patrimony, but an indication of a property
which will descend, whereby on the father's death all his patrimony, following that right as the fruit doth flower, actually descends and imparts itself to
the son....Thus then we have discovered the source of the law of descent
and succession; and from this we have drawn how property capable of
descent originally took its spring; how, also, that property annexed itself to
man; and lastly, how, descending from man to man by right of succession, it
infuses itself into each succeeding heir (291-292).
By the transmutation of sweat, property is both inside and outside the body; thus, it
becomes possible to transmit both forms through the blood. The sin of Adam and its
transmission to the human race recede into the background in this narrative that
accounts for the origin, acquisition, and transfer of property.
There is, however, a story of dispossession contained within the Brother's
account of the origin of property. At this particular point in his narrative, it is not
clear if Eve participates with Adam in the acquisition of property. Indeed, he has
already observed that God "called Adam and Eve by the one name of
Adam9...[w]herefore no woman, as also no man, eats her bread without sweat"
(281). It would seem, therefore, that women as well as men acquire and internalise
the property earned through work. Yet as the Brother's argument unfolds, he focuses
on an opposition between property that is movable and personal and property that is
immovable and real. This division works to exclude women from the descent of
property and royal succession. As he explains, the property Adam acquires through
his labour,
does not apply to every kind of property, but only to property in immoveable and praedial things, which things are lasting as man's nature is. But
things moveable and personal, which are not permanent, though gained by
labour, do not always pass to heirs, but often to executors, trustees, legatees, and ordinaries, and sometimes to wives and children, to be divided
among them, distributed according to various local customs, in various
ways (292).
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As the Brother will later remark, movable property is distinct from immovable in
that it can be "seized and disposed of 1 (314).
Up to this point in the treatise, the Brother, along with the Grandson, has
argued that natural law prohibits a woman from inheriting public property while it
permits her to inherit private property. We recall that she is, according to the Brother,
"the natural and domestic medium between the grandfather and the grandson, by
which the blood and private inheritance of the grandfather may be transferred to the
grandson, yet in respect of the kingdom, which is public property, and which the
daughter cannot receive from the grandfather, she is a strange and foreign medium"
(297, emphasis added). The critical distinction is between private and public. And
since Fortescue has stated that before the Fall all was held in common, his account of
the origin and acquisition of property is in effect a narrative of the origin of private
property. Thus, women would not be excluded. Yet in this part of his argument, the
Brother does not use the terms public and private. Rather thev are tacitly displaced by
"immoveable and praedial" and "moveable and personal." The substitution amounts
to a rhetorical sleight of hand, lending the aspects of movability and the personal to
private property, since a woman can inherit it, and the aspects of permanency and
immovability to public property, since only a man can inherit it.
The substitution also implicitly constructs and endorses a stereotypical difference between masculine and feminine identities. Although a woman must earn her
bread, the type of property she acquires is "not lasting as man's nature is" and thus is
not capable of descent. The movable property she acquires is always subject to confiscation; in turn, inconstancy, instability, and the personal constitute feminine identity—a description that works well with Fortescue's exposition of Eve's disobedience
to God and Adam. For although the penalty of earning one's bread is, as the Brother
remarks, "indifferent and common to both sexes, the woman sustains other great and
grievous penalties," and because of these additional, different penalties, the "Divine
judgment evidently shows that she sinned worse than man" (282). Eve's sin is worse
because out of a desire to fulfill her own pleasure she presumed to instruct her superior. As the Brother reasons,
it would not have become so great a Judge to deprive of the honour of
dominion, on account of his folly, the man who, by the woman's insult fell;
but inasmuch as the inferior deserted her original obedience, it was agreeable to reason to increase the weight of the superior's power over the contumacious one more severely than before, even if that superior had been
guilty of the greater crime (282).
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It becomcs clear, then, that the notion that Adam and Eve possessed all things in
common before the Fall was not precisely correct. Adam was the superior from the
beginning. Indeed, a natural inequity always existed in Paradise for the purpose of
organising the created world.
God's decision to "let us make man, and let him preside...over every creature"
includes along with the creation of the rational being the creation of justice and law
(232). 1 0 By this double-faceted directive, God endows man with the office of prelacy
and the law to govern other creatures; they are his properties, and in Fortescue's
words, they are "innate in him, contemporary with him, and eternal" (235). These
natural properties then designate the superiority of man over the created world,
including woman. It is Eve's disregard for Adam's natural authority, the inconstancy
of her obedience, that justifies her greater punishment. Before the Fall, the Brother
remarks, the Law of Nature "left the woman to submit herself to the man; decreed
that [she] freely obey [him]; and taught that the woman should be advised and
directed by the man." But as she "abused her liberty and made light of Adam's
authority by presuming to teach him, Divine law has "diminished her freedom...and
has appointed him from henceforth to be a stricter schoolmaster than he had [been]
before...Man [thus]...has been endowed with power, that, if she rebel, he may be
able to compel her to obey" (282-3).
As the Brother explains it, the penalty imposed on Eve for instructing Adam is
multifaceted. At its most basic level, the punishment targets the relation between
desire and pleasure: "what could have been a more fitting punishment for the
woman," the Brother asks, "who for her own pleasure incited the man to death, than
that she should bring forth with pain the man whom she longs to bring forth to
life?" (282). Eve and her descendants, therefore, are subjected to a punishment that
uses desire as both the instrument and object of punishment. It follows then that
Eve's disobedience entails a resignification of feminine desire, or a change in its properties, an alteration that complicates the meaning of pleasure. As the Brother reasons,
"the subjection of the woman, which had formerly been to her desirable and joyful,
was now by that judgment [against Eve] bestrewn with the most bitter circumstances" (304). 11 Now that desire is disassociated from the original pleasure of feminine subjection to masculine authority, it would seem to follow that women would
then find pleasure in acts of disobedience to that authority. Hence, by taking away
from Eve the alleged original pleasure of subjection, natural and divine law—according to the implicit logic of the Brother's reasoning—produce the very conditions for
disobedience that they penalise. 12
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Nevertheless the etiology he presents is used to justify the punishment of
women, of feminine desire, by men. As he observes,
What can be more irksome than to be robbed of liberty? or more repugnant
than to be deprived of one's own will, and subjected to the will of another?
It was also of necessity a torment to the woman to be compelled to tremble
under the threats of another, instead of enjoying her former
delights.... [S]ince the man has been appointed the lord of the woman, he is
able to threaten her, and therefore to inflict punishment on her. All these
things the said judgment hath worked in the woman's case (304).
Eve and her descendants, therefore, bear the weight of the Fall, and the punishment,
as formulated by Fortescue, is delivered through a metaphor of crime: she is "robbed
of liberty." Thus, while the consequences of the first sin endow Adam with the power
to acquire and transfer property to his sons and they to theirs, they have the opposite
effect for Eve and her descendants. She becomes a figure of dispossession, transmitting "the infection of her crime" to her heirs.
Indeed within the Brother's exegesis of royal succession, a woman marks a break
in the chain or ladder of descent, a break that corresponds to a fall:
...we may describe descent to be progression from above [from God] by
steps of causation. Wherefore, if anything descend not on this ladder step
by step, but sink headlong to the bottom, its lapse is not a descent, but a fall
and a downthrow, which things threaten death, and are not the marks of
life. For a fall is a desertion of the law of nature, and so tends to corruption,
and hastens into non-existence; as doth everything which refuses to be led
by nature's law....And since every fall is a defect, seeing it is a defection from
nature's guidance, every fall is also a vice and a sin, that is, a transgression of
the order or nature (293).
A woman, therefore, has not only succumbed to and participated in the first Fall, but
she comes to represent the pervasiveness of sin in the temporal world. Like a fall, she
is a "defect... vice and sin...a transgression." From this exposition as well, we see that
man's original authority over woman has been supplemented: "Thus hath the Lord
hired the man with perpetual wages, the stipend, namely, of power and the honour of
lordship, that he may prevent the woman from further transgressing the precepts of
nature's law" (282-3). Adam thus "earns" this "bread," die power and honour of
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lordship over woman, through Eve's sin and transfers this authority to his descendants. Through Fortescue's exegesis of the Fall of Adam and Eve, he not only "discovers" the origin of property and the law of inheritance, but in a sense he
confiscates the original property of woman, the liberty she held before the Fall, and
allocates it to man.
The Law of the King and the Confiscation of Property
The Brother's explication of Eve's relationship to Adam both before and after the Fall
demands that a woman be governed by a man; thus, the Daughter has no right to an
office that would place her in a position of authority over men. Since, however, the
Brother must not only invalidate the Daughter's claim to the throne but the Grandson's as well, it is not enough to have natural and divine law privilege men over
women: distinctions must also be made among men. As we will see, the law of the
king, which Fortescue identifies as an extension of natural law and the defining feature that separates a regal dominion from a political one, provides the means to do
this.
In Part I, Fortescue attempts to trace the history of kingship back to the first
king on the earth, but he acknowledges that the task is impossible since the Bible
passes over this event in silence. He, therefore, turns to the history of Israel and to its
first king. God had told Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their progeny would be
kings, but the installation of the first king of Israel does not exactly fulfill this divine
promise. As Fortescue reports, it was the people of Israel, not God, who decided that
it was time to have a king. Wanting to be like other nations, the Israelites approached
the prophet Samuel with their request. Since Israel's desire was, according to Fortescue, a sin, tantamount to "chang[ing] king God for king Man," the origin of kings in
Israel, like the origin of property, is precipitated by sin. Endeavouring to square this
sinful beginning of kingship in Israel with the divine promise and with natural law,
Fortescue reasons that:
[Although that people committed a great offence in asking for a king, this
proveth not that the kingly dignity which they demanded is an unjust thing,
nor doth it condemn the law under which that dignity came into being.
What is there more sacred than the Pontifical office, although it is sought
by wicked men? Now, the Lord in this proceeding...approved and commended the kingly power in divers ways. For he appointed them a king
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chosen by Himself alone, and not by them, and anointed him with the holy
oil and made him His Anointed...which He never did for any king before.
Moreover, He filled that king with the spirit of strength and prophecy, and
changed him into another man (204).
This passage serves at least two important functions, rescuing, as it does, the office of
king from any misuse to which a particular king may put it and making it clear that
the office itself exempts even bad kings from any punishment that their subjects may
wish to impose on them. The deaths of such men are to be prayed for, observes
Fortescue, but it is "not lawful for any one to do this thing, least of all their subjects,
to whom many times, as required by their own deserts, the Lord appointed wicked
kings....let the people fear to kill their Icing, although a tyrant...the kingdom is his"
(197). By anointing Saul, God changed him, altered, augmented his properties, not
only giving him the spirit of strength and prophecy but the kingdom as well.
Like the Brother's interpretation of the Fall, this account of kingship involves sin
and punishment, and the punishment comes in the form of the law of the king. For
Fortescue, Samuel's warning to the people that a king will "take your fields and your
vineyards and olivevards, and will give them to his servants" constitutes this law
(202). Property is, obviously, once again the focus of law and punishment. The law
of the king represents "nothing but the king's power, which a prince governing royall}' can exert over his people; but when that law is referred to the people, to them it
is always law, though sometimes good and sometimes bad" (216). The law of the
king, like the law of nature, is a supplement to divine law, a remedy for yet another
instance of the stubborn willfulness and the disobedience of human beings.
Fortescue, however, acknowledges that the power of the king to take the property of his subjects seems to contradict the basic tenet of natural law, that is, "to do
unto others as you would have them do unto you: for this is the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12). He asks,
What king ever wishes or could wish this to be done to him, that the best
things for which he had laboured should be taken from him and given to
one who had laboured not? And if he cannot be suspected of wishing this
to be done to himself, and yet can lawfully do this to another, then doth the
law which the Prophet pronounces judge that to be lawful to him (the
king), which the law of nature forbids to be done (202).
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Fortescue attempts to resolve this "war" between the law of nature and the law of the
king by arguing that justice requires that each person receive a proper award: "What
judge awards good things to him who deserves evil, seeing that even' just arbiter recompenses good to the good, evil to the evil?" (208). Indeed the law of the king conforms to this sense of justice, since the people of Israel did an evil thing by asking for
a king: they abandoned God who had chosen them "from among all peoples to be
His peculiar kingdom, and most tenderly brought up by Him, as an only son by his
father, and ruled by laws which He, in His great kindness, gave for their singular rule
and favour" (207).
Not every king, however, possesses the power to use the law of the king. Fortescue reserves the use of that law for those kings who rule royally, not politically. As is
well known, he describes the English monarchy as a mixed form of rule: the king
rules both regally, or royally, and politically. Indeed, in this treatise, which is ostensibly about the problem of royal succession in the kingdom of Assyria, references to
the laws and government of England are frequent. Hence, with regard to the regal
portion of the English monarch}7, Fortescue defines a royal government as one whose
laws are authorised by the king, and the kingdom is subject to the king's dignity, that
is, possessed "by kings and their heirs in hereditary right, in such manner as no
dominions are possessed which are only politickly ruled" (206).
Although "[r]oyal Law did not take its rise in Paradise....like the law of nature"
(221), it nevertheless burst forth "when man's nature had been polluted by sin, and
the purity of original innocence lost under pagan kings in the earth....[such] that
[royal] law was allotted out of a certain Divine severity to the king of Israel for the
ruling of an inconstant people, stiff-necked and unthankful, who, by desiring a king,
had provoked God to wrath" (221). Though Fortescue separates temporally the origin of the law of the king from the origin of property, his description of the moment
when the law of the king first appears repeats the original Fall since "the purity of
original innocence [was] lost under pagan kings," though the loss of original innocence by Adam and Eve would seem to preclude the possibility of losing it once
again. In effect, Fortescue almost conflates the two falls—he diminishes the distance
that separates the two to a single important difference: the creation and restriction of
a supreme masculine authority and identity to one man. The natural inequity that
existed in Paradise and was subsequendy exacerbated through Eve's insubordination
to Adam is exacerbated once again through the constitution of regal dignity and the
law of the king as the power to confiscate the property of subjects. Male subjects are
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thus threatened by a punishment that feminises them, and Fortescue thus prepares
the way to dispossess the Grandson of the King.
This procedure relies on non-static conceptions of feminine and masculine identities and of private and public realms. One of the first extensions of the domestic or
private realm into the public follows a statement made by the Daughter in which she
argues that only married women are subject to the authority of men. Interpreting his
mother's argument as though it had created an opposition between women and the
"sacrament of matrimony" rather than between married and single women, the
Grandson rejoins:
...in that the first woman had the presumption to guide her husband, she
transgressed the rank assigned to her condition in the order of the universe,
and thereby merited the punishment decreed by the said judgment. How
then could wedlock have been the sinner....It was not wedlock that sinned,
but the female sex was the offender; and, therefore, one penalty has now
deservedly involved married and single women alike. For the sin of the
woman broke out of the vicious disposition of the guilty sex, and not out of
the sacrament of matrimony... Nor is a woman when free from the bonds of
wedlock released from the power of man; ...she will not escape from obedience to him who bears supreme rule over the country in which she dwells.
And, therefore, it is not permitted to think that only married women are
subject to men (304-5).
Here the Grandson reasons that a woman holds the position of a wife whether or not
she is married on the premise that the relation between a woman and the supreme
ruler of her country replicates her relationship with her husband: the domestic relationship has been politicised.
As the boundaries between domestic and political unobtrusively break down,
the distinctions between masculine and feminine identities also become less categorical, a necessary tactic if Fortescue is to reconcile the Brother's account of the origin of
property with the law of the king. The two narratives indeed pose a tactical problem.
Property according to the Brother accrues to men through their labour and becomes
infused with the blood and is by that means transferred from father to son. On the
other hand, the royal dignity expressed through the law of the king allows a king to
confiscate the property of his subjects. How does one go about alienating or
abstracting an innate property from the blood ?
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Although Fortescue does not pose this question directly, he addresses it indirectly Interrupting the Brother to speak in his own voice, Fortescue refers to an
English legal practice that explains how both internal and external properties of subjects are controlled by the law:
[I]η the Kingdom of England there is a law of such a kind that, if any one
shall have been convicted, or, to use the words of that law, attainted, of felony or treason, his blood is forthwith adjudged by that law to be so corrupted that, although by the prince's favour he escape death, he
nevertheless will not be capable henceforth of succeeding his parents in
their inheritances, nor will any of his posterity succeed him in his inheritance. Wherefore, if from that time in the lifetime of such an attainted person, or after his death, his father shall have died possessed of a property,
however great, the son of the man so attainted will not, by the law of the
land, be capable of succeeding his grandfather in his patrimony;... [A]s the
inheritance of such a grandfather cannot descend to his son who has been
so convicted, so neither can it descend to his grandson by the son so convicted, inasmuch as there is an intermediate step between the grandfather
and the grandson, namely that attainted son...because anything which
descends cannot leap over or pass by any step (298-9).
The English practice of attainder derives from Roman law, as Floyd Seyward Lear's
account of the Roman concept of attainder reveals:
Section One [of Codex Justinianus 9.8.5 Ad Legem lidiam Maiestatis] adds
the concept of attainder or corruption of blood since the sons of such an
offender will be spared their lives although they merit the fate of their
father because the inclination to commit his crime is inherited. The infamy
of their father will accompany them always. They will always be debarred
from holding public office or performing public duties. Their lot in life will
be perpetual want; death will be a solace and life a punishment. 13
Through the process of attainder, then, the reverse of the acquisition of property is
put into play, that is, crime dissolves a person's possessions, both internal and external. In effect, the attainted is relegated to the position of a woman who, according to
the Brother's argument, cannot annex, internalise, or inherit immovable property.
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Fortescue then connects the consequences of attainder to the question of succession:
Wherefore, if the case which we are discussing shall have arisen in that kingdom, we cannot doubt that the kingdom in question cannot descend to the
grandson, seeing that his mother, through whom as a medium he would
obtain it, cannot by any right possess it....Wherefore...the grandson....since
his mother by judgment of the law of nature is incapacitated for her father's
kingdom, and so he cannot succeed his mother therein, cannot à fortiori
succeed his grandfather through the medium of his mother (298-9).
With this further explanation of attainder, Fortescue goes beyond Justinian. Rather
than inheriting an incapacity from a father who has been condemned as a traitor, the
Grandson has acquired it from his mother. While the attainder for felon}' and treason
is imposed 011 him by English law, the Daughter is by the law of nature always
already attainted: she is by Eve's unnatural act of disobedience represented as a natural criminal, as naturally corrupt.
Inheriting her tainted blood, the Grandson shares that criminal state. The
"vicious disposition of the guilty sex" he had attributed to his Mother now becomes
his as well. Therefore, the Brother of the King urges the Judge to "put [the Grandson] to silence by thy sentence" (300). He is to share his mother's fate; and she, as
the Brother directs, is to be prohibited "from any more demanding her father's kingdom, since...its entrance [is] shut against her with so man}' bolts and bars, that
henceforth all ingress is for her impossible" (284). Although not guilty of having
committed any crime, both the Daughter and the Grandson are attainted, the
Daughter naturally and the Grandson legally In this case, however, "legally" operates
as an empty term, since no crime has been committed. Using the English law of
attainder, Fortescue in effect turns the Grandson, and with him the Yorkist Edward
IV, into a woman, thereby justifying the exclusion of both men from the political
realm.
Such a transformation in gender relies on an interpretation that feminine desire
is not only the origin of the sin of disobedience but of the crime of rebellion as well.
One of the earliest associations of women with rebellion occurs immediately after the
Brother has explained how Eve and all women have been made to suffer as a consequence of Eve's original act of disobedience. He asks, "And what is better fitted to
restrain the arrogance of a rebellious subject than to subject the rebel with a firmer
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265
bond to the authority which he hath despised?" (282, emphasis added). The question
actually produces two pertinent resignifications: Eve's sin against Adam now encompasses a political act, the crime of rebellion, and the use of the masculine pronominal
he where we would expect to see the feminine she signals a move from the punishment of a woman to the punishment of a man. Two contradictor}7 but politically
expedient transformations are performed: the disobedience of Eve moves into the
public arena as rebellion, but this move is countered by excluding the rebellious male
offender from the public realm. The man who engages in rebellion is in effect
assigned a feminine identity, and now without any property, he does not properly
belong within the public or political domain. 14
Turning men into women by an act of law indicates, as I have mentioned, that
the féminisation, the dispossession, and the corruption of men is not natural to men
as corruption is natural in the case of women. Such a legal procedure as attainder registers the fact that the rebellious male subject was at least once a man. The differentiation process that exiles attainted traitors and felons from the political domain,
therefore, is secondary to the exclusionary practices that produce gendered identities
on the basis of perceived natural sex/gender differences between men and women. 1 5
As Gayle Rubin has observed, "[m]en are of course also trafficked—but as slaves,
hustlers, athletic stars, serfs, or as some other catastrophic social status, rather than as
men. Women are transacted as slaves, serfs, and prostitutes, but also simply as
women." 16 Being an attainted traitor amounts to a "catastrophic social status." In an
essay that traces the history of representations of women, Elizabeth V Spelman calls
attention to the importance of seeing to "what extent the images and arguments used
to denigrate women are similar to those used to denigrate one group of men vis-à-vis
another, children vis-à-vis adults, animals vis-à-vis humans, and even...the natural
world vis-à-vis man's will....For to see this is part of understanding how the oppression of women occurs in the context of, and is related to, other forms of oppression
or exploitation." 17 Not only authorising the confiscation of external properties of
traitors, acts of attainder thus altered gendered identities by declaring the attainted to
be disabled at law, bereft of all civil privileges, and their blood to be corrupt. 18 Diagnosing bodies to be corrupt, bills of attainder provided the justification to restrict the
movements of traitors within society, to quarantine them, and distinguish them from
the general population. 19
In England, attainder had long been a punishment for treason before the fifteenth century, but the procedure had tended to be an informal one. The proscription
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Sir John Fortescue's Theory of Natural Law
of the Duke of York and his supporters in 1459, however, generated a standard for
future acts. Enacted by Parliament, but under the close supervision of the king,
attainder in the latter half of the fifteenth century was not the consequence of a trial
in which an accused had been found guilty of treason. In point of fact, fifteenth-century attainder operated only in the absence of judicial process 20 and can be seen as a
legislative form of summary judgment, and as a manifestation of the law of the
king. 21
The attainders of Jack Cade, the Duke of York, and the Earl of Northumberland
during the reign of the Lancastrian Henry VI provided not only for the confiscation
of their lands, but also for their disablement at law and the corruption of their blood.
In the case of Cade, parliamentary rolls record that in addition to the forfeiture of
goods, lands, and income, his blood was declared corrupt; hence, through his blood
Iiis heirs were "disabled for ever. 1,22 Likewise, attainders of York and his allies
required that they be "disabled for ever to have or enjoye any enheritaunce in any
wise hereafter...an in lyke wise their heires." 23 A record of a petition made by Henry
Percy to reverse the attainder of his father, the Earl of Northumberland, describes the
severity of such a penalty by reciting its consequences.
Howbeit that by force of an Acte made ayenst his Fader...the same late Erie,
among other persons, was unabled to have, hold, enherite or joie, any name
of dignities, estate or preeminence, within this Reaume...and the heires of
the same late Erie, were unable to clayme or have by the same late Erie, any
suche name estate or preeminence. 24
With their blood declared corrupt and their civil rights denied, attainted traitors were
a new creation whose exclusion from the public realm and the possibility of restoration depended on the king's prerogative.
Acts of attainder thus illustrate the capacity of the law to enter into the interior
spaces of the body for the purpose of condemning and regendering it. As we have
seen, divine, and natural law define the disease of crime, especially that of rebellion
and treason, as the (un)natural disease of women. As a consequence of crime, the law
transfers the natural disposition of the guilty sex to men, a move that not only
dispossesses male subjects of their land, but of their "innate" masculinity as well. In
the Brother's exegesis of the origin of property and its ramifications, it is the identity
of the King alone that fused with the property of the kingdom remains thoroughly
Ε. Kay Harris
267
masculine, thoroughly autonomous, thoroughly royal, profiting in every case as did
Adam from both the obedience and disobedience of his subjects.
Fortescue and the Law
The power which Fortescue allocates to a regal monarch or to a regal and political
one, such as the English monarch, is secure only within his text. The Wars of the
Roses blatantly attest to its fiction. With the throne of England oscillating between
the Lancastrian Henry VI and the Yorkist Edward IV from 1460-1471, neither line
was thoroughly and unchangingly royal and masculine enough to exempt itself from
the attainders that were legislated against it once the rival dynasty had gained ascendancy. In a sense, then, Fortescue through his writing creates and sustains the regal
properties of the king, interposing himself between the law and the king; in other
words, he is the liaison between the ordained properties of the king and the person of
the king.
As mentioned earlier, the proscription of the Yorkists in 1459 set the standard
for future acts of attainder. It is highly unlikely that Fortescue did not have a part in
writing the bills that declared the Duke of York and his heirs to be traitors and their
blood corrupt. If the preamble to York's attainder is compared to Fortescue's description of the ingratitude of the people of Israel for abandoning ""king God for king
Man," similarities emerge. The confiscation of York's land and the corruption of his
blood is justified by the Duke's ingratitude:
Please it your Higness to calle to youre noble remembrance, howe Ye had
Richard Due of York in his vong age, in your most high presence and noble
Court, and hym all that tyme cherisshed and favoured; and afterward at
gretter age, for the love, trust and affiance that Ye had in his persone, made
hym youre Lieutenant of youre Realme of Fraunce and Duchie of Normandie, and created his 11 eldest sonnes Erles, and graunted hym Offices
and grete benefettes....So that it could not be thought a subjet...[would]
have had more cause to have been true, obeisaunt, and diligent to serve and
love his Soveraigne Lord then he had. 25
According to this record, the Duke of York and his sons, like the Israelites in their
relationship with God, owed everything to Henry VI, and they, too, failed to
acknowledge this debt. 2 6 Thus Henry, like Adam and Saul, profits, however briefly,
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Sir John Fortescue's Theory of Natural Law
from the disobedience of his subjects, and so do the royal jurists who in composing
this bill fulfill Samuel's role. As Ralph A. Griffiths has observed, the royal jurists
undertook this task "with an eye on the rewards which might come their way for a
job well done." 2 7 And they were rewarded for their labour; Henry redistributed his
newly acquired property to his loyal supporters. For example, shortly after the attainders had been passed, Fortescue was entrusted with some of the confiscated lands. 28
It must be remembered, however, that Fortescue writes De Natura from what
seems to be a weak or "catastrophic" position. For he along with Henry VI was
attainted as a traitor by a Yorkist parliament soon after Edward IV became king. But
De Natura works for Fortescue in two important ways. First, by proclaiming a line of
descent that includes a woman to be unnatural and false, Fortescue invalidates the
new identity that Edward IV and his parliament have imposed on him. In fact, it is
the descendants of a woman who are naturally prone to deviate from natural law and
instigate rebellion: Edward and the Yorkists are the traitors. Although De Natura
does not refer explicitly to the wars fought by the Yorkists and Lancastrians, the topic
of civil war both introduces and ends the treatise. After the Judge has ruled in the
Brother's favor, Fortescue remits his text to examination of the "Supreme Pontiff,"
and explains,
If in the preceding Treatise we have arrived at firm and impregnable conclusions, we have extinguished that fuel of malice which has kindled up to this
time such unceasing wars among kings. I mean that inveterate error by
which women, and their heirs through them, have been thought able to
succeed to the throne in sovereign kingdoms (331).
According to this logic, Philippa, the granddaughter of Edward III and the conduit
by which the Yorkist dynasty traces its line of descent back to Edward III, has passed
on through her blood the "inveterate error" of presumption which now escalates into
usurpation and civil war. In effect, the claim of the Grandson or the claim of the
Yorkists to the right to rule represents another fall, in that they seek to acquire property that does not belong to them and to alter the natural hierarchy of king and subject. Thus their pretensions require a punishment comparable in severity to that
which God imposed on Eve. Edward and his supporters are to be treated as women.
De Natura also goes far to enhance Fortescue's position as an authority on law
and the governance of the kingdom, and it completes the task he has set for himself
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269
at the beginning of the treatise. Emphasising in the beginning of the treatise the need
to explain the law of royal succession, Fortescue proclaims:
Oh, then, what a pious and holy thing it would be to reveal the truth which
here is sought, stripped of ever}' veil of error, naked and shining! Seeing
that under the cloud of this ignorance so many hard-fought wars, so many
civil contests, pervading the whole world, have prevailed, not only in the
most noble kingdoms of France and England, but in ver}' many other
regions also, where the bloody sword, accompanied only by the justice of
this truth, has devoured thousands upon thousands of men. This truth,
therefore, if it can be made plain by a definition beyond doubt, will, by the
guidance of God, appease wars not a few already begun, and will withdraw
material for the beginning of the like hereafter (191).
By uncovering and declaring this truth, "a pious and holy" act, Fortescue is the vessel
by which rebellion in any kingdom will be destroyed. Moreover, he makes the case
that jurists who for their years of study in all laws, including divine law, are especially
equipped to uncover the relation between divine, natural, and human law (241-2).
The "higher mysteries of the law," as he explains, "remain for those who are learned
in the law" (247). 2 9
The Lancastrians, however, were ultimately defeated in 1471, and Fortescue's
treatise did not have one of its desired effects: that of restoring Henry to the throne.
His treatise, nevertheless, stood him in good stead. For although Fortescue was one
of the lawyers that the Yorkists were "intent on bringing...to book" for drafting the
bills of attainder against them, 3 0 he was not put to death when he was captured. The
fact that he was not attests in part to his successful representation of himself as an
authority on all aspects of law. Fortescue's attainder was reversed, and he once again
enjoyed a privileged position within a royalist circle, Yorkist not Lancastrian. As a
condition for the reversal of the attainder, Edward IV stipulated that Fortescue
retract those writings he had composed in Scotland. And the way in which Fortescue
retracts the argument of De N attira manifests once again his tacit and skillfull allocation of feminine characteristics to a man. In this case, it is he who occupies the feminine role by acknowledging to the king that his exegesis on natural law and royal
succession is inadequate—not an objective exposition but an "informal tale" based
on his partiality for Henry VI (534). Through this dutiful submission to Edward IV,
Fortescue regains both his masculinity and his property.31
Sir John Fortescue's Theory of Natural Law
270
Fortescue's capacity to prove himself eminently invaluable to two rival kings
challenges the idea held by a number of legal scholars that he was an early constitutionalist. In his preface to Fortescue's De Laiidibus Legum Anglie, for example,
Harold Dexter Hazeltine remarks that this fifteenth-century Chief Justice "was in
revolt against authority." 32 Nevertheless, Hazeltine remarks near the end of his preface that Fortescue's "books anticipate some of the reformative measures which in fact
led to the establishment of the Tudor kingship in the sixteenth century as the strongest English monarchy since the time of the Normans and the Angevins." 33 Indeed,
based on his ability to shape and allocate feminine and masculine properties—
whether his own or a king's or a traitor's—Fortescue did not revolt against authority.
Rather, in a godlike performance, he created authority; and he created it both masculine and royal.
University
of Southern Mississippi
Notes
1 7 Henry IV c. 2, Statutes of the Realm (rep. London: Dawson, 1963), 2: 151.
Earlier in the same year, Henry had wished to restrict succession to his male heirs.
Advised against such a strategy, however, the King acceded to the more inclusive formulation "Heirs of his Body begotten" without marking the sex/gender of those
heirs. See Paul E. Gill, "Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century England: The
Polemical Writings of Sir John Fortescue," Speculum 46 (1971), pp. 331-47, p. 338.
2 Rotuli Parliamentorum: ut etpetitiones, etplacita inparliamento, ed. J. Strachey,
et al. (London, 1767), 5:376. See E.F. Jacob, "Sir John Fortescue and the Law of
Nature," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 18 (1934), pp. 359-76, p. 362.
3 Jacob, p. 362.
4 Another current of thought, however, was emerging in fifteenth-century
England that offered an alternative, positivist legal thesis: that laws were the creation
of men, designed for the common good rather than for the morality of individuals.
Although it was hoped that secular law would embody natural law, a discrepancy
between the two did not justify disobedience to statute law. Only a subsequent law,
made by men, could invalidate a prior law. See Norman Doe, Fundamental Authority
in Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1-83.
Ε. Kay Harris
271
5 In De Natura Fortescue relies chiefly on the older tradition that secular law is
subordinate to natural law. But by also positing that the laws of men are supplements
to both natural and divine law, Fortescue clouds his position. As supplement, the secular law may be seen as a corrective to natural and divine law and/or as ultimately
divine in its origins. Such ambiguity is typical of Fortescue, even present in his most
famous elucidation of the English monarchy as both political and regal. See Doe on
the irreconcilable tensions in Fortescue's works, especially Chapters 2 and 3.
De Natura is not as well known as two of Fortescue's later works, De Laudibus
LegumAnglie and The Governance of England, and in comparison with these two
texts, it has received much less attention. While critical editions are available for these
two works, De Natura exists in an 1869 edition only. In addition to Doe and Jacob,
op. cit. De N attira is discussed in J.H. Burns, "Fortescue and the Political Theory of
Dominium," Historical Journal 28 (1985), pp. 777-97; J.L. Gillespie, "Sir John
Fortescue's Concept of Royal Will," Nottingham Medieval Studies 23 (1979), pp.
47-65; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political thought and the
Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975), 25-29; Walter Ullman, Principles of
Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 1961), pp. 178 n., 191.
6 All references to Fortescue's treatise are taken from The Works of Sir John
Fortescue, collected, arranged, and translated by Thomas (Fortescue) Lord Clermont
2 vols (London: Printed for Private Distribution, 1869), by page number.
7 In effect Fortescue's exegesis of the origin of property through the Fall of
Adam and Eve combines two strands of thought in the evolution of property and
natural rights: The older, theological tradition that links property to sin and the Aristotelian concept which gained currency from the twelfth century onwards that justifies property as integral to society, which according to Aristotle, is the natural state of
man. See Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann,
Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 707-8 and pp. 760-1.
Fortescue's emphasis on the relation between property and work has led some scholars to regard him as the defender of private property or the champion of the middle
class. Richard Schlatter, for example, in Private Property: The History of an Idea (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1951) observes that Fortescue "combined the various medieval theories of property in the very fashion in which they were going to serve the purposes
of bourgeois apologists for the next three or four hundred years. His defence of
property is at once a summary of medieval, and an introduction to modern, history"
(72).
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Sir John Fortescue's Theory of Natural Law
8 Qtd. in Schlatter, p. 66. According to Schlatter, Fortescue's theory of property
and "its insistence on labour as the basis of man's title to property ... is indistinguishable from the theories of Locke and the eighteenth-century proponents of natural
right" (74).
9 Cf. Augustine: "Now Seth is called 'resurrection,' and Enos his son is called
'man,' not as Adam was; for Adam is man, but in the Hebrew it is common to male
and female: for it is written: 'Male and female made He them, and called their name
Adam': so that Eve doubdess was so properly called Eve, but that Adam was a name
common to them both. But Enos is so properly a man, that it excludes all womankind (as the Hebrew linguists affirm), as importing the son of the resurrection where
they shall not marry nor take a wife. For regeneration shall exclude generation from
thence." The City of God, trans. John Healey (London, 1957), 2: 82.
10 For an overview of the complex history of evolving theories of natural law
during the Middle Ages, see The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, pp.
705-770.
11 Cf. the Daughter's argument that a woman is not subject to man before
Eve's sin (301). In fact, it is her line of reasoning that leads the Brother into an
extended discussion of the subjection of women to men.
12 Although the unnatural act of disobedience to men becomes natural to
women—with normative deviance now constituting feminine identity—the
Brother's analysis evokes an inherent lack in the original pleasure; without such an
inadequacy an act of disobedience would have been impossible.
13 Treason in Roman and Germanic Law (Austin, Texas, 1965), p. 44. For more
on the English use of attainder, see John G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in
the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 177-205; Michael A. Hicks, "Attainder, Resumption, and Coercion, 1461-1529 " Parliamentary History 3 (1984):
15-31; J.R. Lander, "Attainder and Forfeiture, 1453 to 1509," Historical Journal 4
(1961), pp. 119-51.
14 Cf. Plato's discussion of cowardice: "[tjo have more concern for your body
than your soul is to act just like a woman." He concludes, "[T]he most proper penalty for a soldier who surrenders to save his body, when he should be willing to die
out of the courage of his soul, is for the soldier to be turned into a woman...." This is
Elizabeth V Spelman's paraphrase of Laws, 944e, in "Woman as Body: Ancient and
Contemporary Views" Feminist Studies 8 (Spring 1982), pp. 109-31, p. 115. For a
Ε. Kay Harris
273
succinct overview of the history of anti-feminism in the Middle Ages, see Howard
Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago,
1991).
15 There are rare instances of women being attainted in England as a result of
their husband's act of treason. In these cases, it seems that the king wanted to make
absolutely sure that family properties were indeed forfeited to him. See Anne Crawford, "Victims of Attainder: The Howard and de Vere Women in the Late Fifteenth
Century " Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989), pp. 59-74.
16 "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward
an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975), pp. 157-210, pp. 175-6.
17 Spelman, p. 120.
18 As power was increasingly centralised in the late Middle Ages, more and
more distinctions between men had to be made in order to justify the crystallisation
of power into one image, that of the king's royal majesty. Operating exclusionary
processes, acts of attainder may be seen as one facet of this consolidation. See my
study of representations of treason in Arthurian literature and late medieval law,
forthcoming.
19 Attainder was a civil death. Swift's description of the place of the immortal
stnddhruggs in Luggnaggian society succinctly describes a civil death procedure.
After turning eighty years old, the strtddbruggs "are looked on as dead in
law....[T]hey are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot
purchase lands, or take leases, neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause,
either civil or criminal...." Gulliver's Travels in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed. 2 vols (New York, 1993), 1:2135. See also Foucault's discussion of the
leper and the distribution, organisation, and image of power in Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), pp. 195-230.
20 J.G. Bellamy, Law of Treason, pp. 169-70. He notes an instance in which
attainder was part of an actual trial in Parliament (p. 176).
21 This summary of the history of attainder is taken from my "Evidence against
Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory's Morte Darthur·. Treason by Imagination," Exemplaria 7 (1995), pp. 179-208, pp. 200-201, which relates attainder to the noise of
infamy.
Sir John Fortescue's Theory of Natural Law
274
22 Rot. Pari, 5: 224.
23 Ibid., 5: 349.
24 Ibid., 5: 389. Depending on the king's prerogative, attainders could be
reversed, but, in many instances, reversals amounted to a piecemeal process. For
example, if a traitor succeeded in obtaining a pardon, it was not always accompanied
by a restoration of blood, and honors need not be made part of the pardon.
25 Rot. Pari, 5: 346.
26 The Yorkists were intentionally excluded from the parliament that passed the
bills of attainder against them, and they along with certain chroniclers of the period
proclaimed the injustice of the action taken against them. The outcry generated
another piece of royalist propaganda defending the king's use of attainder, the Somniitm Vigilantis, a text often attributed to Fortescue. See Somnium Vigilantis, printed
by J.P. Gilson in "A Defence of the Proscription of the Yorkists in 1459," English Historical Review 26 (1911), pp. 512-25.
27 The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461 (Berkeley, 1981), p. 824.
28 Rot. Pari, 5: 70, 355. See Paul Eugene Gill, "Sir John Fortescue: Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Polemicist on the Succession Problem, Governmental
Reformer, and Political Theorist," Ph.D. Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University
(Ann Arbor, 1968), pp. 41-42.
29 Cf. Sir John Fortescue: De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes
(Cambridge, 1946; rep. Holmes Beach, Florida: W W Gaunt, 1986), 9-13, and The
Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885), pp. 118-20, pp.
138-40, and p. 144 where jurists are compared with priests and prophets.
30 Griffith, p. 824.
31 Cf. Eve K. Sedgwick's analysis of Horner in The Country Wife: "Because of
his ability to submit to, gain momentum from, and thus expropriate the irrepressible
and divisive power of gender representation, Horner constructs for himself an intelligible two-phase narrative of féminisation followed by (rather than contradicted by)
masculine recuperation." Between Men: English Literature and Male Honwsocial Desire
(New York, 1985), p. 60.
Ε. Kay Harris
275
32 De Laudibus, xix. See also D.W Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth:
The Development of Civic Conscionsness in English Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.,
1970), p. 218.
33 De Laudibus, p. 1.